They say China progresses fast, but this fast? At the end of August, BYD announced that its Yangwang U9 Track Edition reached an astonishing speed of 293.54 mph, making it by far the fastest ever electric car. Now, just a few days ago, they also announced that the Yangwang U9 Xtreme, which will be limited to around 30 production units, became the fastest ever road-legal production car. This is an astonishing feat that will have a huge ripple effect on the rest of the automotive world, but it still begs the question: where is the new Tesla Roadster?
Firstly, how did the U9 Xtreme pull this off?
Well, it uses the same 1,200-volt battery pack as the Track Edition, which is just a rewired BYD LFP blade battery. That’s right, the fastest car in the world uses the same cells as a £20,000 budget EV. It also uses the same four-motor setup, with each wheel having its own 555 kW (744 horsepower) motor, for a total power output of 2220 kW or 2,977 horsepower! That makes the Xtreme and the Track Edition the most powerful production cars ever made, being nearly 50% more powerful than the second most powerful. The Xtreme uses a different suspension, tyre and wheel set-up, and has optimised its aerodynamics for high speed, such as including a longitudinal “shark fin” for stability. So overall, it isn’t actually that different from the Track Edition.
These little tweaks allow it to rocket up to a top speed of 308.4 mph! That might seem like a small step up from the previous fastest production car, which Bugatti took back in 2019 with a top speed of 304.8 mph. But don’t forget, the faster you go, the more viscous the air becomes, and the harder it is to accelerate, so this 4.4 mph difference is actually a pretty reasonable improvement.
However, there is also the context of the record. The Bugatti speed record was set on a private 12-mile-long straight road. This gave it ample time to reach its actual top speed. Because acceleration drops off as speed increases, having a good few miles to let those last few miles per hour trickle onto the speedo can make all the difference.
Meanwhile, the U9 Xtreme set its record on the ATP banked oval test track in Germany, which only has a 2.5-mile straight! The U9 Xtreme was able to go around the banked corners at a staggering 180 mph, but to go from that to 308.4 mph and back down to 62 mph for the next corner, all in 2.5 miles, is utterly insane. It shows just how much harder the U9 accelerates at high speed than the Bugatti. Additionally, if you watch the video, the U9 Xtreme hadn’t actually stopped accelerating before the driver had to brake for the corner. In fact, at 300 mph, it was still accelerating fairly linearly at the same pace an economy car does from 0 to 60 mph. So, the U9 Xtreme could likely go significantly faster if you put it on a longer road.
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